Bravo AV Challenge: New Jersey Home Theater Renovation
Choosing the perfect partner
When searching online for “Home Theater New Jersey,” our dealer Bravo AV will immediately pop up. A recently retired homeowner in Mendham, NJ did just that while looking to renovate the existing home theater in his new home.
Typically, most clients don’t go into Bravo AV’s showroom asking for a certain brand or setup. Equipment isn’t initially discussed at all. They go in, are seated in a chair, and watch and listen to a couple of clips of music and a couple of clips of a movie.
Designing a theater
The discussion then turns to the theater and how they will create it. In the Mendham project, the upgrade seemed uncomplicated. Indeed, the room had risers for seats already built and a closet big enough to hold all the equipment. The owner’s driving goal was that he wanted the biggest screen that would fit in the space. Therefore, they chose a Screen Innovations 128-inch diagonal 16:9 Acoustically Transparent Fixed screen.
When first getting to the site, the installer measures the theater for accurate representation of where everything will be. It’s imperative to be crystal clear on what the viewing angles will be for the first, second and third rows. Too great a viewing angle is very annoying because there’s too much stuff going on in one’s periphery. Engineering is a time-consuming part of the job, and 50 hours of engineering time is typically allotted.
The room didn’t have much height, so in order to provide proper sight lines for all three rows of seats, and to give the owner his dream screen, the entire riser system had to be ripped out, and because of that all the walls were also ripped out. Since there was a tremendous amount of molding and pillars around the room, it all had to be taken out as well. So much for the uncomplicated upgrade.
StormAudio products - no phd required
The homeowner is not only a major sports fan but he’s also a musician and actually has a practice room in his home for his band. While he watches movies in his theater, his main viewing involves sports and concerts. Besides the large screen, he wanted the whole immersive sound experience. So Bravo AV moved from a traditional surround-sound speaker configuration to an Atmos configuration. Knowing that he was a musician, Bravo AV automatically thought, “better ear.”
The overall goal was for the room to perform at its absolute best. They chose the StormAudio ISP.32 Digital AES MK2 32-channel processor to help achieve that goal. Real immersive sound provides the listener with a life-like, three-dimensional sound experience, creating the sensation of height all around the audience. This is what the homeowner was looking for.
Two or three years ago, Bravo AV was in the market for a new processor company and after talking with several different manufacturers decided on StormAudio. They are very happy with the StormAudio product and with what it allows them to achieve in the field. As they say, “You don’t need a PhD to configure it”.
